Most Americans know almost nothing about the latest lawyer Donald Trump has brought on, Rudolph Giuliani. If they know anything at all, it is that he was Mayor of New York some time ago. I'm not that lucky. I live in the second city of the Tristate New York Metropolitan Area, so I know a lot about Giuliani, including the FACT that he tried to overstay his term of office, using the World Trade Center attacks as excuse. He wanted to stay on, for an unknown time, and continue to be mayor, despite the fact that NYC has term limits AND there had been a mayoral election that chose Michael Bloomberg to be the next mayor.
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Bloomberg would have NONE of that, but pushed Giuliani OUT of City Hall.
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Bloomberg himself also defied the two-term limit. Incomprehensibly, he persuaded the City Council to extend the limit to three terms. He too is thus a dictatorially-inclined enemy of society. But he has not been brought into the Trump world of scandals, conspiracies, lies, and incompetence, a world into which Rudolph Giuliani fits perfectly. I'm glad Washington, Lincoln, and other great Presidents did not live to see the tragic condition into which this country has descended.

Today, April 29, 2018, the news and feature program CBS Sunday Morning broadcast an insanely despicable segment about declining numbers of Atlantic puffins (an adorable, colorful sea bird) in Iceland that blamed that decline on "climate change", less surreptitiously called "man-made global warming". Oh? The story admitted that puffins are HUNTED and EATEN by Icelanders, and even that a restaurant the CBS crew ate at offered puffin hors d'oeuvres! But that couldn't possibly be what's causing the decline in puffin numbers, could it?
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Never mind that people have killed off every last member of various species, such as the dodo and passenger pigeon, and very nearly exterminated the American buffalo, which once numbered in at least the tens of millions. Enlightened U.S. Government action not just saved the buffalo from extinction but also made it into a food source that in no way risks the creature's continued existene. Indeed, on a visit to the Dakotas, I not just saw buffalos in the wild but also ate a buffalo burger. It was quite a disappointment, because pretty much every ground meat  beef, turkey, buffalo, pork tastes much the same; odd but, in my experience, true, especially if you punch it up with some ketchup, a pickle siece or relish, and present it on a litely toaested hambuger bun (which is NOT a bun for a patty made of ground ham  which it might as well be, because almost no one could identify the meat. Wikipedia has produced a list of 67 pages of species rendered extinct by human activity, and admits that the list is NOT COMPLETE. No, "climate change" is killing off the puffin! SURE it is.
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Why don't we now just rewrite history and make the dodo, passenger pigeon, bison, and dozens of other species victims of climate change?! Then we can sit aside, and let Viking savages who KILL and EAT puffins escape blame for their monstrous misbehavior.
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Contrary to popular belief today, the climate when dinosaurs thrived was much hotter than today. You can find articles online with headings such as "EcoAlert: Earth was Stifling Hot During Peak Age of Dinosaurs", but, grotesquely, the word "degree" DOES NOT APPEAR in that article, and many others. Still, the point is that life reached its apex in the size of animals, and probably plants, when Planet Earth was much hotter than it is today. And, today, the places on this planet with the greatest biodiversity and proliferation of life are HOT. That should not astonish anyone. Compare (or, more sensibly, contrast) the Siberian tundra and Brazilian rainforest. But you don't have to go that far afield to see the real effects of temperature on life. Just look around you if you live in a temperate or cold climate and you can see that life in the cold is hugely disadvantaged and reduced, and MOST of what we see in the summer is dead or dormant in the winter.
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So NO, it is NOT [man-made] climate change that is decimating puffins, but barbarous, criminal behavior by Icelandic savages. So many people are so stupid and rapacious that they destroy not just the very species their own lives depend on but also innocent-bystander species. Dolphins are killed in tuna fishing; sea turtles die from bowel obstruction when they mistake floating plastic debris for jellyfish, a staple of their diet, in vast mid-oceanic islands of floating plastic; abandoned commercial fishing nets trap and kill large numbers of fish that are not harvested. Elephants are killed for ivory that could be harvested by tranquilizing adult elephants and harvesting one trunk each, so they could still use one trunk as they need to; and rhinoceroses are slaughtered for their horns, which idiot Chinese savages employ in traditional medicine and, astoundingly, to fight sexual impotence! Yes, that's right. A country with 1.4 BILLION people needs to make heterosexual men "horn"ier, so that, in time, China might have 18 billion people! That's what this planet needs, isn't it, billions and billions of Chinese, at the cost of eradicating all species not required as food for those predatory masses! Mind you, China has abandoned its one-child policy, because it feels it NEEDS MORE PEOPLE! All the while, CBS and other Western media that should know better make EXCUSES for criminal savagery. If the puffin has to go extinct because Icelanders are barbarians, and if elephants and rhinoceroses have to disappear from everyplace but zoos — and even one European zoo has been attacked by poachers — well, that's just too bad, or, as Walter Cronkite, CBS's most famous news anchor, used to intone, "that's the way it is". But that's not the way it has to be.
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"Human" beings DO deserve blame for hugely adverse impacts upon this planet, but "climate change" is not one of them.

Donald Trump is a six-year-old in a 71-year-old's body. He is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 239 pounds. So, folks, we have a new world's record, the biggest six-year-old ever on planet Earth! Whoop-tee-DU!
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That Trump's mental age is 65 years retarded from his physical age should not matter. A lot of our "leaders" are highly deficient human beings. Democracy is not supposed to bring out the worst in people. At least that's not what we thought would happen. But, because the human race is, in large part, slime, and aggressively self-vaunting scum run roughshod over their moral and intellectual betters, we end up with one mental defective after another after another, from Donald Trump to Bashar al-Assad to Kim Jong-Un, regardless of the ostensible form of government. Democracy does not keep the unfit from taking over from their betters.
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The working theory behind popular democracy is that the larger the number of people involved in making a decision, the more likely they will decide wisely. One person's perceptions will be balanced out by another person's, and one person's prejudices will balance out another's. That often works, but the process can be thwarted, as by our idiotic Electoral College, which all too often NULLIFIES the electoral result, substituting the judgment of the minority for the judgment of the majority. It is urgent that the Electoral College be ABOLISHED, but the losers of unfair Electoral College outcomes PERMIT this unfairness. Why? Why would the winner of the popular vote accept the defeat of the people? Why is there no DEMAND that the Electoral College be abolished. Why are there no mass rallies, no demonstrations shutting down the center of major cities, no chanting, no ANYthing? Accepting anti-democratic results to elections is criminally irresponsible behavior, an assault upon democracy, co-conspiracy in injustice. It is incomprehensible that any political party would co-conspires in its own victimization.
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The greater good of the greater number is a reasonable standard. But it needs qualification. How much greater the good, to how much greater the number? And WHICH people are disfavored? as against which people are favored? What if the people disfavored start out worse off than the people favored? That is, what if the richest 1% or 2% of the population benefit hugely from tax reform, while the 98% disfavored are only slightly harmed? But what if 30% of the people injured by the new taxation regime are pushed over the edge into catastrophic poverty? They lose their houses, cars, and all economic security in old age? Would the Trump reform of the income-tax system have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency, not just the popular vote? Of course not. So the Democratic Party has co-conspired in the passage of a tax reform that will definitely increase gross disparities in wealth. In combination with changes in the funding of campaigns, this tax system ensures that American society will become more and more unfair, and the rich will become more and more callous to their fellow-citizens. We are in essence suffering an American Counterrevolution, the substitution of plutocracy for our progress toward a just society, which has at times suffered jerks and reverses but has, despite setbacks, later resumed the march toward universal fairness.
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I am not confident that we are going to resume this march now, because the institutions have been fundamentally altered to rig the system against social fairness. It will take a monumental effort to reverse recent anti-democratic laws and institutions — either that or a series of assassinations that will scare the rich, would-be tyrants into yielding rather than dying.

MSNBC's top news-talkshow anchor, Rachel Maddow, has a bugaboo about Russia "attacking" the U.S. national election of 2016. She has, indeed, in recent months become a "Janie One Note", giving over the bulk of her airtime to this one topic, of all the things going on in the Nation and world. She doesn't always make sense, and occasionally makes indefensible errors of pronunciation and grammar. Yesterday she actually said that Russians "target we the people"! Huh? "Target WE"? Is she retarded?
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Maddow was in her glory last nite when Robert Mueller, Special Counsel in the investigation of Russian actions in the 2016 U.S. elections, issued what purported to be 13 indictments of Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities for 'interference' in that election.
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Some of these unlawful pretend-indictments are of Russians IN RUSSIA. The U.S. Government cannot indict Russians IN RUSSIA! That is an attack upon the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, which nation is the exact equal of the United States in international law. Would we permit Russia to indict Americans on American soil for violations of Russian law? Mueller's asserted indictments are little short of an act of WAR.
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The United States cannot extradite Russians from Russia to face charges in the United States for things that did not take place in the United States. Only 2 of the people indicted even set foot in the U.S., and that might only have been to do research, not commit acts in contravention of U.S. law. What Russians do in Russia is NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.
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Hacking remotely into U.S. computers would not be possible if Americans would stop putting onto the Internet things that plainly do not belong on the Internet. If you put your computer online, you are essentially inviting everyone on Earth to hack into your computer. Yes, there are things like firewalls available to the general public, but governments need more protection than does the ordinary private citizen.
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Computers do not come out of the box, plugged into the Internet. You have to choose actively to PUT your computer online. There are ways to partition your activities to things that can and cannot be seen by people trying to get into your computer. There are ways to password protect and encrypt things you don't want others to see. There are ways to prevent mass password attempts, such as America Online has done very effectively, permitting, say, three attempts to log in before you are barred from further login attempts for some specified period, such as an hour or day. It is most unlikely that any robot could try thousands of passwords if the most they could try per hour or day is THREE!
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If you don't know how to do any of this, and your privacy is important to you, you should find out how to protect your information from intrusion. The onus is on YOU. To do nothing is like leaving all the doors and all the windows in your house unlocked and then being surprised that somebody came in and stole everything of value. Surprise, surprise!
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Let us return to Russia's SOVEREIGN activities that may or may NOT have affected the 2016 U.S. election. As far as I have heard, NOT ONE VOTE was changed from what a citizen cast, by Russians or any other dirty-tricks actors, within the U.S. or anywhere else on Earth. NOT ONE VOTE!+
Yes, we apparently know that Russians may have hacked into the computers of various boards of elections in various places in this country, but as far as we know from what has been reported, those Russian intruders did not change one single vote anywhere in the country, much less in key Electoral College states. NOR did Russians block from voting, anyone entitled to vote, much less EVERYone from voting. For, how could Russians know how John Smith in Kenosha, Wisconsin or Joanna Alexandropoulos in Astoria, New York would vote, if Russia did not interfere with their right to vote? (Names mentioned here are fictitious.) It was NOT Russia's intent to "attack" U.S. elections, but to tilt the outcome, and for that, you would need to know who would vote which way, and selectively block the people who would vote opposite to your preference.
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Contrary to the silly assertion I have heard on TV, we do NOT have to go to paper ballots rather than electronic voting machines. Even if we did use paper ballots, how would the results from the various polling places be conveyed to the local board of elections, and totaled with the results from other polling places, and reported to the media? Are all these numbers going to be conveyed on paper or by telephone, only?
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Neither Russia itself nor any of its governmental entities can commit a crime under U.S. law, because Russia is not SUBJECT to U.S. law, any more than the United States is subject to Russian law. It's the same as a New Jerseyan being indicted in Alabama for something that is a crime in Alabama but not in New Jersey. Would you like to be held accountable under the laws of every state in the Union and every country on Earth? Ridiculous.
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Russia enjoys SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY from U.S. laws. The United States enjoys SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY from Russian laws. Tit-for-tat, even-steven.
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Mueller is not the Czar of Earth. He is not all-powerful and cannot dictate to the entire planet. He is just some functionary within the United States, ONE country, not two, nor 193. He doesn't even have authority over Canada or the Bahamas, much less the Russian Federation, the geographically largest country on Earth, armed to the teeth with, authorities believe, some 4,300 nuclear missiles (as against our 4,000). How are you going to enforce your make-believe indictments, Mr. Muller?
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The larger question, however, about fake identities and false information put out by Russian trolls is "Why would anyone believe anyone they never heard of when they say something ridiculous?" The moral of the story is that "gatekeepers" are indispensable to sensible credibility. If 'Mark Davidson' in Podunk says one thing, that you have never heard from any well-regarded media outlet, but The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times all say the opposite, which should you believe? If idiots want to believe 'Mark Davidson' and disregard all major media, no one can stop them from letting idiocy determine their vote, because idiots will be idiots, and we don't have an IQ test for voting. Maybe we should.
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Certainly if Texas and other states can discriminate against voters on racial and other grounds (see the Wikipedia article "Voter suppression"), we can impose a minimum intelligence requirement on voters. But we should not do that, even if we could make an intelligence test part of the voter-registration process -- which we COULD do, as a matter of public policy, if we were so to choose.
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Quite the contrary, we should have MANDATORY VOTING in this country, as have various other democracies, to require everyone who is physically capable of voting to do so. Wikipedia reports, at its article "Compulsory voting", that "As of August 2013, 11 democracies — about 5% of all United Nations members — enforce compulsory voting out of 22 countries listed worldwide as having a compulsory voting system. [Emphasis added.]"
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Another thing we could and should do is offer, in every election for government officials, a "None of the Above" ("NOTA") option, so that people who claim that they don't vote because there is no one they want to vote for, will no longer have that excuse, but will be given the opportunity to register their disapproval with all the candidates by voting NO to all of them. The advantage of NOTA is that it tells the parties that they HAVE to offer better candidates, and cannot just sluff off low voter participation as an artefact of apathy or laziness. Rather, the parties would be held to account, and they would be pressured to offer better candidates.
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In short, the problems we have with our elections are not Russian "interference" or "attacks", but the gross defects of our electoral system, at all levels of society. The Electoral College must be abolished, and it's hard to understand why anyone would oppose that. After all, no other level of government has an Electoral College. The popular vote is not just the only vote that counts but is also the only vote cast, in school-board elections, elections for mayor and council, for state governor, state assembly, and state senate, and for members of the U.S. House and Senate. So why would anyone fight a simple popular vote for President? On what basis? Before we lose faith in democracy, we really should try it.

(Welcome back to the Union, that is.) Alabama is no longer — or at least is not for now — in insurrection against the United States of America. Will this last? Will Alabamians enjoy no longer being pariahs, like their peers in neighboring Mississippi? Or will they, after a very few years of being truly part of the Nation, decide that the nation they'd rather rejoin is the Confederacy?
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Only time will tell. Sometimes people adjust well to new realities under new circumstances, even being relieved at the changes they have seen. Other times, the mind rebels. People can become so agitated and uncomfortable that they have to return to their personal status quo ante a major change in their life or in social or political conditions around them.
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A few people who begin to relax and accept new realities recognize more or less aloud that life is easier and more pleasant once they accept what the Great Seal of the United States calls "novus ordo seclorum" — "a new order of the ages". Few will consciously put two and two together to accept that in order to keep someone down, you have to stay down yourself, so that in taking your foot off another person's neck, you empower yourself to rise to such heights as your own abilities will take you. Wouldn't it be great if EVERYONE who in the past enjoyed unfair advantage in conspiring against some of their fellow-citizens, were to understand, and state aloud, that THEIR lives are better for not having to hold other people down, or even just somewhat back, but for now being able to SOAR above the vicious, the petty, the mundane, to think great thoughts and do great things?
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Alabama is one of only six states in the (48) conterminous United States (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida), and eight in the entire country (including Alaska and Hawaii) that I have not been to or thru. Maybe I will visit Alabama sometime, now that it is a Southern State, not a Confederate State.

Seth Meyers, host of NBC's talkshow Late Night, on the nite of Tuesday-into-Wednesday, December 12-13, drew a preposterous distinction in a 'comedy' bit after his opening monolog ("Couple Things"; see it here), and became insanely indignant about that absolutely meaningless distinction.
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Kayla Moore, wife of Ray Moore, candidate for U.S. Senate from Alabama, is shown rebutting the accusation that she and her husband do not like Jews by saying that "one of our lawyers is a Jew". For that simple, innocent, INNOCUOUS statement she was lambasted by Far Leftists, and Meyers piled on. It seems he found the term "a Jew" offensive, and insisted that she should have said instead that their lawyer was "Jewish". Hello?, sh*head: there is absolutely no difference between "a Jew" and "[a person who is] "Jewish". NONE.
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"Jew" is not a dirty word, whereas "Jewish" is brite, shiny, pure, and unsullied. Mr. Meyers, don't you have legitimate issues to address?
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Seth Meyers is a lazy S.O.B. who works only four nites a week, as does the other lazy late-nite host Jimmy Kimmel. These lazy bastards should be required to work five days a week, like everybody else in the real economy, and even fellow latenite talkshow hosts Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. It's not as tho they have to slave away dumping smelly trash cans into garbage trucks for 16 hours a day. Their program is ONE HOUR long, and even adding in some time for reading thru the things that WRITERS would have them say, and even if they participate in writing sessions (and I don't know whether they do or do not), and even if they have to rehearse — but why would they? they read from a f* TELEPROMPTER!, don't they? — their "workday" is hugely less than the standard seven or eight hours that everybody else, Americans living in the real world, works. NBC should tell Meyers, and ABC should tell Kimmel, to work their half-day FIVE NITES a week, or look for work elsewhere, because they will be FIRED.
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As for the whole "Jew" / "Jewish" megilla / mishegoss, we have here the famous "distinction without a difference". Is Seth Meyers' personally rich and hugely overpaid life (Meyers is reported to make over $3 million a year, for a workWEEK of, what, 16 hours?) so lacking in substance that he has to FABRICATE issues? Apparently Meyers thinks the word "Jew" has (to cite the Wikipedia article linked to above) "connotations associated with it that one party to an argument prefers to avoid". So, little Mister Meyers, you think that "Jew" is a dirty word, do you? That's on YOU, not Kayla Moore.

I present below the text of an email I sent this morning to U.S. Senator from Minnesota Al Franken, under the same subject line as the title of this post.

Fight the Castration Crowd, and tell the Radical Feminist lynch mob to go f* itself! The latest I heard of your "accusers" was December 6th, when a woman accused you of the horrendous crime of kissing her! Do we really want to criminalize kissing? Things have plainly gone way too far, and it's time to restore balance to male-female relations in the United States. Lesbians and lesbian-led women want to impose an Eleventh Commandment on this country, "Boys Shall Not Be Boys" — and enforce it with preposterously excessive punishments for TRIVIA, physical trivia and emotional trivia. Sex is just sex. No big deal.
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The conspiracy against manhood has risen to the level of a Castration Conspiracy, in which all things male are to be condemned, all men are to be regarded as sexual predators, and all women are "victims" of male abuse. To borrow from what one woman, decades ago, urged us as to something else, "Just say no!"
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The incidents I first saw reported involving you date back DECADES, and were not prosecuted by the supposed "victims". What victim of RAPE or sexual molestation does not go to the police? NONE. Thus, even if something sexual did happen, the "victim" must have been a willing participant, not a "victim". Even in the case of the pseudo-incriminating foto of your reaching toward a woman's breasts (but not actually touching them, as far as I could tell from the picture) while she was asleep, you would not have permitted yourself to be captured on film during the commission of a crime. Res ipse loquitur: there was no crime there. If she didn't feel a thing and was not emotionally affected at the time, there was no crime. Moreover, as I understand things, you were NOT in government at the time, so private actions of a private person that were NOT complained about to government have NO RELEVANCE to your role in society today.
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We seem on the brink of a massive Sexual Counterrevolution, in which the efforts of millions of people to free society of insane prudery and individuals from ridiculous restrictions on sexual and affectional activity, could be largely undone, such that we would be plunged into The Bad Old Days when natural interests, urges, and activities are criminalized. Would men be the only casualties of such a war against sex? Plainly not. So in fighting to stop criminalization of manhood, you would simultaneously be fighting to stop criminalization of womanhood.
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Perhaps you do not appreciate that Donald Trump became President not DESPITE his remarks on the Billy Bush tape, but BECAUSE of them: because one of the things that the Angry White Men who are his core support are angriest about is the active contempt endlessly heaped upon all things masculine by an increasingly deviant and lunatic society. Those Angry White Men — and as regards the mistreatment of men, nonwhite men also feel rage — are likely to elect Roy Moore to the Senate, again, not DESPITE his behavior decades ago but BECAUSE of it, in a state in which local traditions have always allowed of child marriage and young (sexual) love.
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It seems to many men in this country that there aren't 7 working testes in the entire heterosexual population. Men are treated like contemptible children whose only shred of masculinity is WATCHING children's games being played by college and professional athletes, that is, watching OTHER people exercising, while letting their own bodies fall to pieces.
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Donald Trump proved he was a 'real man', not one of our tens of millions of latter-day psychological eunuchs, first, in his initial remarks to Billy Bush, and then in his defense that it was all just "locker-room" talk: locker rooms in which women are not (yet) permitted. Trump has had three wives (so far), and discarded each when he was done with her. That sure hasn't hurt him politically either, has it? So why should you play into your enemies' games? Why abandon the Senate and reduce Democratic strength by one, at the self-same time that Republicans are likely to GAIN by one? Or is all that talk of Republicans being consigned to legislative failure if even two of their members of the Senate do not toe the line, all bullsh*? [I should have added, and now do add, "Sorry, cowsh*."]
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I have always been very glad to be gay, but rarely as much as now, when women are making plain that no sane man should have anything to do with women. I'm the guy who at age 23 proposed the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used round the world. But I don't want gay men to be "collateral damage" in what we might call attacks by 'efeminated' women (the equivalent of emasculated men) on all things masculine. We fought for our freedom once. I don't want us to have to fight for it again.
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Hugh Hefner died recently. Will the Sexual Revolution in which he played so valuable a role be buried not long after him?
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Fevered irrationality on men's sexual attentions to women, who CLAIM not to have wanted to be found attractive and be pursued, might work in unexpected ways. What if revulsion at men's sexual desires for women should turn to women's part in their own "victimization", and to punishing women for their participation in lustful encounters by forcing them to live with the consequences of their acts, such as being denied the 'right' to kill a child to cover up their tracks in willing sexual encounters? Would the women now trying to push you out of office want a return to punitive behavior on pregnancy, and a total ban on medically unnecessary abortion? Anyone who thinks that the furies of harpies could not possibly turn upon women in unexpected ways does not understand that emotions do not follow logical rules nor patterns, so anyone can be true victims of shame-driven antisexualism.
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So fight the good fight for MEN'S rights to be men, and NOT to be presumed rapists because they have sexual thoughts and even activities with women, women who did not complain to the authorities at the time but now pose as innocents. Fight back. If you are told you must take the bullet for a Democratic Party that is increasingly estranged from American values; if people insist you go down in flames to protect the party, tell them that if you go down in flames, you are going to take as many of THEM with you as possible.
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People of the hypocritical ilk you are dealing with are fond of saying things like "Freedom is indivisible". Tell them that that cuts both ways: women's rights are not one whit superior to men's rights, and men have no reason to permit themselves to be victimized by women. That would be to co-conspire in doing injustice, because injustice to men would have to be injustice to women too, wouldn't it, if "Freedom is indivisible"?
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The Democratic Party has lost its mind. You can help bring it back in from the cold by trimming back the nonsense and telling the crazies to shut up! The present course of enlisting in every lunatic movement hostile to our traditions is driving more and more people into the arms of the Republicans. Save your own "seat" (so to speak), and contribute to saving the Democratic Party too.